‘Soda Politics’ and ‘Saving Gotham’

A single can of soda, I think we can all agree, will do you no harm. Twelve ounces of carbonated, sugar-sweetened liquid won’t send you spiraling into metabolic syndrome. All it takes, in fact, is 23 minutes of cycling to burn off the 140 calories from all that “scary” sugar — the very same sugar, it’s worth pointing out, that’s found in healthy foods, such as apples, pears and strawberries.

If that line of thinking sounds reasonable to you, Big Soda’s playbook is working. It’s been working since the 1950s, when the Coca-Cola Company gave $5,000 to the chairman of nutrition at Harvard Medical School, who would go on to write an article for McCall’s magazine promoting “soda, ice cream or a Coke” as an appropriate snack for teenagers. The strategy remains essentially unchanged. In 2012, Coca-Cola gave the city of Chicago a $3 million grant to help promote the message that “all of our products can be part of an active, healthy lifestyle that includes a sensible, balanced diet and regular physical activity.”

And that’s just one strategy. Big Soda employs Washington lobbyists. Big Soda throws money at science and scientists. Big Soda pays for and defends “pouring rights” in elementary schools, high schools and universities. And Big Soda continues to insist its products offer an excellent source of “hydration,” which is a little like saying smoking fulfills the basic human need to inhale. Big Soda knows what it’s doing.

Fortunately, so does Marion Nestle. The nutrition professor, advocate and investigator best known for “Food Politics” profiles the soft drink industry in her expansive, superbly researched new book, “Soda Politics: Taking

On Big Soda (and Winning).” It isn’t so much a narrative as a well-organized barrage of facts, some eye-popping (the world’s soda companies produce nearly two trillion 12-ounce servings annually), others banally incriminating. They come off the page like jabs in a sustained pummeling lasting more than 400 pages. Even if Nestle is only half right, it’s still a total knockout.

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Roughly half the population doesn’t drink soda on any given day. The half that does is more than likely to be young, male, poorly educated, Hispanic or ­African-American, and overweight. A quarter of Americans drink more than one 12-ounce cola per day, and 10 percent drink more than four — a caloric load requiring more than an hour and a half of biking each and every day.

Research has linked unbalanced soda consumption to obesity, Type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, stroke, dental disease, bone disease, depression, gout, asthma, cancer and premature death. These links, as Nestle clearly points out, are more correlative than causative. But all those correlations add up. To Big Soda’s “just one won’t hurt” head fake, Nestle counters with a frightening totality of evidence. A study she cites estimates that sugar-sweetened beverages are responsible for 184,000 ­obesity-related deaths per year.

The book’s style is what you might call earnest nutritional advocate. The closest Nestle ever gets to tension is phrases like “It is worth taking a minute to think about Coca-Cola’s business model.” If you’re looking for a gripping page turner or weight-loss epiphanies, you’ve come to the wrong author.

While some might see this as a weakness, I consider it a strength. There is no sense that Nestle is profiting from alarm, peddling false enlightenment or whipping up our mistrust of food companies. A good scientist, she worships at the altar of evidence, and her skepticism extends to both sides of the aisle. When it comes to the claim that soda can age you as much as smoking, Nestle announces, “I consider this finding highly preliminary.”

If “Soda Politics” has a flaw, it’s the “and winning” part of the subtitle. Yes, soda consumption is down somewhat over the past few years, thanks in part to a switch to slightly less sugary sports drinks, teas and vitamin waters. Is this winning? Or is it just a less terrible defeat?

Maybe what we really need to do is approach the battle for our bad habits the way the big companies do: Duke it out for market share. Make slick ads. Above all, change the way people think.

That’s what Tom Frieden attempted when he was hired by Michael Bloomberg to be New York City’s health commissioner in 2002. The commission’s campaign against chronic diseases of lifestyle is told in “Saving Gotham: A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives,” by Frieden’s successor, Tom Farley.

Like “Soda Politics,” this book shouldn’t be judged by the writing but by what the writer knows. As an insider’s account, it offers a few juicy details: Bloomberg’s love of Cheez-Its; the surprising number of former Sandinista sympathizers who worked alongside a billionaire; the delicious failure of the Napster co-founder Sean Parker to get the mayor to change his position on e-cigarettes.

The book’s most interesting section recounts a multiyear campaign to bring down New York’s smoking rate through a series of antismoking TV ads. In 2006, the data-obsessed Frieden noted a sudden decline in the smoking rate among Hispanic men. It was thanks to the “Ronaldo” ad, which depicted a Hispanic cancer patient named Ronaldo Martinez deflecting water from his tracheotomy as he showered and saying, “Nothing will ever be the same again” in a computer-generated monotone. “Dying,” Farley writes, “wasn’t frightening.” Suffering was what moved the needle: pictures of blackened lungs, gangrenous toes, fat-clogged arteries and a neck tumor the size of a tennis ball.

So here’s an idea. By all means, keep Beyoncé on cans of Pepsi. Just make it a morbidly obese Beyoncé in a wheelchair, glugging from a one-liter bottle. But something tells me Pepsi won’t be taking up this challenge.

SODA POLITICS

Taking On Big Soda (and Winning)

By Marion Nestle

Illustrated. 508 pp. Oxford University Press. $29.95.

SAVING GOTHAM

A Billionaire Mayor, Activist Doctors, and the Fight for Eight Million Lives

By Tom Farley

310 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

Mark Schatzker is the author, most recently, of “The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 22, 2015, on Page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Things Go Worse. Today's Paper|Subscribe